So, Cisco (disclaimer: I work at Cisco, although not in the group working on the NSSxxx products) has recently decided to stop selling their Qnap OEM’d NAS devices. See the link here. For those of us who have one of these in our labs (I have a NSS326 myself), this means no more firmware updates from Cisco. But, the latest firmware for these devices from Cisco (version 1.5, Release Notes PDF here) does allow for users to migrate from Cisco firmware to the stock Qnap firmware. So, how easy of a process is this? I was able to do this myself, I thought I would document the steps for others to follow here.

You may want to backup your data first. I did not do this, but depending on how important your data is, it’s wise to consider this step.

First, acquire the NSS 1.5 firmware from cisco.com. Once you have that, go ahead and load this onto your NSSxxx device and reboot.

Once the device is running 1.5, go ahead and download the latest Qnap firmware for your device (link here).

Load the Qnap firmware onto your device, and reboot.

You should now be running the stock Qnap firmware for your OEM’d Cisco NSSxxx device.